Nice try, Ruth, but Nicola Sturgeon was elected First Minister by MSPs in 2014. Rishi Sunak has been elected by no-one.

Y’know, it’s funny. There was no such front page in 2007 when Brown became PM without a vote (no GE til 2010) or in 2014 when @NicolaSturgeon became FM without a vote (no Scottish elex til 2016)

It’s **almost** as if their pearl clutching sanctimony is actually partisanship… pic.twitter.com/K3ygCqghcm

— Ruth Davidson (@RuthDavidsonPC) October 25, 2022

Does the Colonel have a fair point here? Spoiler: no of course she bloody doesn’t, but let’s at least start by giving her credit for a couple of specific aspects of her tweet. Firstly, it’s obviously true that the Record is a repulsive “newspaper”, the existence of which represents an ongoing crime against humanity, and it would do all of us a tremendous service if it voluntarily winded up operations immediately. (Although the idea that it’s “partisan” in favour of the SNP as well as Labour is downright risible.) And secondly, I think most independence supporters would agree in retrospect that it was sub-optimal that Nicola Sturgeon did not face a contested leadership election in 2014. Although her victory would have been assured anyway, it would have been highly desirable for her to have been required to engage in an internal SNP debate about the way forward in the immediate aftermath of the indyref defeat, and also about the medium-term strategy for independence in the event that Brexit reopened the issue. To some extent the depute leadership election served as a proxy for that debate, and you might remember that I backed the eventual winner Stewart Hosie, because his strategic vision seemed clearest and strongest to me, but ultimately we knew we were electing someone who wouldn’t be calling the shots.

However, let’s now look at the differences between the processes by which Nicola Sturgeon and Rishi Sunak ascended to office, because you don’t have to look far to find some.

* The SNP leadership contest in 2014 was not rigged by an absurd rule stating that each candidate had to be “nominated” by twenty-eight per cent of the entire parliamentary party. Nicola Sturgeon was elected unopposed simply because there was no other candidate with non-trivial support who was willing to stand against her.

* Nicola Sturgeon was not “elected unopposed” by a rigged system less than two months after being beaten fair and square in a contested leadership election by someone else.

* Although Nicola Sturgeon didn’t face a contested election to become SNP leader, she did face an election among MSPs to become First Minister. It’s surprising Ruth Davidson doesn’t remember that, because she stood in that election and was heavily defeated by a margin of 66 votes to 15. Rishi Sunak, by contrast, hasn’t even been elected as Prime Minister by the House of Commons – he’s simply been appointed by the King in line with constitutional conventions.

* The Scottish Parliament has five-year fixed terms, so it’s wired into the system that a new First Minister will see out the remainder of the term unless extraordinary circumstances occur. There is no such barrier to Sunak seeking a proper mandate from voters – this very Tory government changed the law to hand the power of choosing the general election date back to the Prime Minister. (Incidentally, in doing so they outrageously extended their own term of office – the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in a tinpot dictatorship. This parliament was originally supposed to end with an election in May 2024, but in theory that may not now happen until January 2025.)

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